A Compilation of Over 300 Keywords & Phrases that Trigger the Local Carousel

Gregg Gifford, Adam Dorfman and Dan Leibson have each put together lists of keywords that trigger the new Local Carousel. I noticed that while there was some overlap between the lists there was also a number of unique words on each list. I assembled them into one list and with some additional research on my part expanded the combined list to over 300 words.

As with all things Google there are obvious trends and always a few oddities. For the most part the phrases do revolve entertainment, recreation and leisure activities. And there are a few outliers that don’t fit into that category so well. Gluten Free Produce Store hardly seems a leisure time pursuit and nor does piano tuning. But its very difficult to imagine what fun one might have at a Gas Station (props to John Denny for that one). Particularly one near Buffalo.

You can add additional trigger keywords below. But I am also making the list available as a Google Docs Spreadsheet so that you can add additional search phrases that you find that trigger the Local Carousel directly to it, if you prefer.

I assume gas stations show due to being somewhat travel related? (Looking for gas while on roadtrip vacation?)

Have to say as a marketer I like the Carousel due to the images. But just used it practically as a consumer for the 1st time and did not like it. I ended up clicking over to maps to get a traditional list view. (But of course that will go away with the new maps.)

The search I was looking for was “frozen yogurt” which is a new one to add to your list Mike. It pulls a Carousel.

A couple others to add: Buffet and Flea Market. (At least in larger cities that have quite a few.)

You can see the relative results. Jobs is a very popularly used search phrase.(and a very competitive one) Restaurants and pizza have a lot of searches relative to jobs (they are danged popular.)

magician and brew pub were relatively very rare. (magician at a scale of 1 and brew pub at a scale of 0)

Change the search to restaurant NY and the scale for that term runs at a rate of 1 versus the other phrases (unchanged).

While the list is long (and potentially far larger than 300+) its relative usage is a function of many additional elements in search. So I wonder as to its impact overall.

Per the BrightLocal research and relative to your list of 300 (wherein many are restaurant types of searches) I’m interested in how this impacts the restaurant websites, their businesses and how traffic reaches them.

It seems to me restaurant searches might be most impacted by this although it will also impact the travel industry and how people search for accommodations.

On the hotel side, though, there is huge usage of ads and high rankings by strong sites that book rooms. On the restaurant side, I don’t see nearly as many ads for local restaurants in my area.

Here are some other tidbits:

When you search for pizza, you’ll often only find ads for national pizza chains and if there are locals…they fall below the nationals (and presumably below the fold).

Search for pizza with a local geo description and that can change dramatically.

(It appears adwords has a national account with the national pizza chains)

While I don’t work on SEO for restaurants I simply wonder how this will impact searchers for restaurants. I’ve referenced before via conversations with restaurateurs and viewing their volumes of reviews in the DC area…how their appears to be a wide source of potential access to their information and ultimately how many folks get to those places.

As referenced earlier, it appears to me that customers to restaurants are getting there via a number of diverse sources, including google search, and direct sites or apps such as yelp and opentable (among many other sources)

Of further interest and relative to the website connected to my name…our FB page and twitter acct follows a lot of local restaurants/bars. its astonishing how often they post on FB and to a lesser degree twitter, let alone promote and run promos on those sites.

Do those drive traffic? I’m sure they do, I just don’t know how much.

Still another interesting factoid. I follow a local regional food/restaurant website. They referenced about 90+ restaurant openings in the last 4 months. A huge number…but it covers the entire DC region (DC, MD, and VA suburbs which is a large dining out region).

The information on openings was aggregated from a variety of news/food sources. Surprisingly a fair number of those restaurants didn’t have websites (yet) while they had or emphasized their FB pages.

(smb owner operators “get FB” easier than they get “search”.

I also independently asked folks about the Carousel view…do you like it? Is it a better way to find restaurants or worse???

Got different points of view.

All of which is to say we’ll see in the longer term how this impacts restaurants, (possibly adwords advertising for restaurants) searchers of course…and how they access local restaurant information.

Although, I suspect Google already has its data. Its been running the carousel on tablets for months. I suppose Google’s been happy with the results otherwise they wouldn’t have expanded it to pc’s. (unless non business engineers made the decisions) 😉 (its been known to happen over there)

Anyways we’ll see over time.

But in my little neck of the woods neither frisbees or gas stations are showing up in carousel views (and who wants to look at pictures of greasy gas stations anway. 😀

Mike, thanks so much for this info. First time I saw the carousel, I freaked out big time. Very nice of you to provide the list. I’m in the wine region north of San Francisco where there are tons of restaurants that rely on tourism to fill their tables. Only time will tell if the carousel will have positive or negative effects for these businesses. My additions to the Google Doc related to restaurants brings the list to 337. It seems that most nationalities plus the words “food” or “cuisine” triggers the carousel. Sometimes the words “cafe”, “grocer”, or “grocery” after a nationality does the trick. “Italian Deli” triggers the carousel, but “Kosher Deli” does not. Hey Google, what’s up with that? This is obviously a Google work in progress.

Pearl Street is the main street here in Boulder, Colorado. “West Pearl” is the cool section with great restaurants. I randomly did a search today for “west pearl boulder” and “west pearl boulder co” and they both produced carousels.

Interestingly it shows 10 results of a mix of restaurants, antique stores and businesses.

This is too bad! Google already killed 3rd party local listing sources such as YP and now it comes as Local Carousel.And i hope it’s completely going to kill the remaining others.In the other hand ,the local owners now also have to learn to optimize for this new terminology. Thanks for the list of discovered keywords, hopefully the Google add more keywords in the future and kill the competition absolutely.

referencing Dav, comment #7
An excellent example of local influence on the carousel is that while “brewpubs” may not pull much, “brewpubs bend oregon” deliveres a carousel. We happen to have 22 (last count, next week may be different) craft breweries in our town of 80k folks so we probably get different results than a similar search in Topeka KS.

It would be interesting to note the impact that individual search habits has on carousel delivery. In the last 2 months I’ve seen results for “pizza” delivered with and w/o carousel results for searches originating from different ips in the same town.